A teacher from Oklahoma shared what it’s like to live on food stamps – when you have a master’s degree.

These are some of the stories the Guardian’s US editors heard when we began talking with teachers for a series exploring the new wave of teacher activism sweeping the country. As we listened to their riveting – and often devastating –stories during a national teachers’ conference in July, it became clear that no one could tell the story of the crisis in America’s classroom better than the teachers themselves. We hatched the Guardian US teacher takeover and invited a team of educators from across the country to collaborate with us on a project that launches today.

Over the last two months, our guest editors have helped us develop story ideas, photo projects, and written first-person essays that will unfold on our site this week. (Side note to Stephen Colbert: our teacher-editors would like to interview you this week about your involvement with DonorsChoose, a fundraising site for teachers, if you have a few minutes.)

We will be partnering on the series with local publications in four of the states where teachers are paid the least, to extend the reach of the project in communities where teachers struggle most.

The Guardian will also be inviting teachers from across the country to contribute their own stories to this project and help us build a teachers’ wishlist – a manifesto that will outline the basic conditions that teachers need in order to address the crisis in schools. The Guardian will publish these contributions as they come, and at the end of the project, we will present the final wishlist to Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.

Teaching a country’s children is among the most important tasks in society. But what happens when a country fails its teachers? That’s the story we are telling in this three-day series.